Open and secure videoconferencing with Jangouts

Private Chats

Sven Seeberg

Jangouts, an open and free drop in for Skype and Hangouts, when installed on a Raspberry Pi provides a videoconferencing solution for up to 40 users for under $50.

In November 2016, SUSE released a SLES 12 SP2 based Raspberry Pi image. At the time it was the first Enterprise grade Linux Distribution bringing the AARCH64 instruction set to the Raspberry Pi 3 B [1][2].

This article will demonstrate how to set up Janus, an easy to use videoconferencing program which uses web technology based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12. Jangouts is an open source project created during SUSE Hack Week 12 [3].

The Janus project team describes its software as as solution inspired by Google Hangouts. The name stems from Hangouts and the Janus WebRTC Gateway. Janus consists of static web content, mostly HTML and JavaScript, which in turn uses the WebRTC functionality of the browser. Any HTTP server such as Apache2 or nginx can serve the static Janus content.

NextCloud is a fork of the OwnCloud Project as well as a company in its own right. Founded by former Owncloud Developers and captained by the previous OwnCloud Project founder Frank Karlitsheck, Nextcloud aims to strike a better balance between companies, clients and users.